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Bob Dylan FOREVER YOUNG

The Birth of a Folksinger

Bob Dylan

Forever Young

LI FE BOOKS Managing Editor Robert Sullivan Director of Photography Barbara Baker Burrows Creative Director Mimi Park Deputy Picture Editor Christina Leiberman Copy Editors Parlan McGaw (Chief), Barbara Gogan Writer-Reporters Michelle DuPrĂŠ (Chief), Marilyn Fu Photo Associate Sarah Cates Consulting PIcture Editors Mimi Murphy (Rome), Tala Skari (Paris) Special thanks to Dave Brolan and to Aaron Zych and the Morrison Hotel Gallery Editorial Operations Ruchard K. Prue (Director), Brian Fellows (Manager), Keith Aurelio, Charlotte Coco, Kevin Hart, Mert Kerimoglu, Rosalie Khan, Patricia Koh, Marco Lau, Brian Mai, Po Fung Ng, Rudi Papiri, Robert Pizaro, Barry Pribula, Clara Renauro, Katy Saunders, Smantha Schwendaman, Hia Tan, Vaune Trachtman Copyright 2012 Time House Entertainment Inc. Published by LIFE Books an imprint of Time Home Entertainment Inc. 135 West 50th Street, New York, New York 10020 ISBN 10: 1-60320-060-6 ISBN 13: 978-1-60320-060-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 201194547

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Dylan at his home in the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, located just outside Woodstock, NY. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1968 and after long months on a world tour, Dylan takes a break from it all and finds the time and the calm to explore and create his next style of music.

Introduction: Our Dylan The Birth of a Folksinger Inspirations Plugging In Dylan and the Band Retreat, Return Dylan at the Movies Rolling On Just One More

Bob Dylan Forever Young

The Birth of a Folksinger The prodigious Minnesotan Robert Zimmerman, who must certainly have hoped one day books would be written about him, just as certainly never imagined—even in his considerable ambition and his wildest dreams—that there would be so many such books.

Bobby is on percussion in fifth grade music class (he’s seated, at right).

The Birth of a Folksinger

Bobby Zimmerman was born in Duluth on May 24, 1941, but the legend of his extraordinary life usually begins with Hibbing, Minnesota.

Hibbing is a small town. It is his mother’s hometown (his grandparents, both maternal and paternal, were Jewish immigrants from Europe, and were ensconced in Minnesota’s small but tight-knit Jewish community). His family had relocated when Bobby was six after his father, Abe, contracted polio and the Zimmermans required a support system. His childhood seems to have been happy enough. He went to school, he did okay, he liked rock’n’roll. When he wasn’t yet a teenager, his parents allowed him and his friends to practice in the garage, though Beatrice Zimmerman was forced to intercede when Mrs. Schleppegrell from across the street asked politely if the boys couldn’t keep it down because it was her son Bill’s nap time.

While at Hibbing High, Bobby performed first in the Shadow Blasters, and then in the Golden Chords, whose amped-up performance of the Danny and the Juniors song “Rock and Roll is Here to Stay” so unnerved the high school principal that he terminated their performance at the school talent show. As was the case with many would-be rockers in the late 1950s, Zimmerman and his bandmates were constantly being told to turn down the volume—either by their parents, their neighbors or the authorities. To come out of Hibbing and become an iconoclastic singer and songwriter— his name mentioned, in the latter pursuit, with such American legends as Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and Guthrie—to become a Pulitzer Prize honoree, to become one of the world’s titanic cultural figures of the 20 th and early 21st centuries...Well, that was less than unlikely. It was impossible. For that to happen, the individual would have to be a genius. And Hibbing is the first evidence offered when people assert confidently; “Bob Dylan is a genius.” He is that, no doubt.

Bob Dylan Forever Young

He was probably born a genius. Just as certainly, he has always been ambitious, restless, open to experiment, self-aware, ornery, provocative and tireless. But let’s put “inscrutable” and “incomprehensible” aside this time. He’s pretty scrutable, if one accepts his screwiness. And if one dismisses the nonsense that he has enjoyed disgorging in the relatively rare interviews he has given though the years he’s comprehensible—just listen to his songs. Dylan plays games, no doubt about it; he always has. And the game— playing tends to obscure his seriousness of purpose. He is still on the road on his Never-Ending Tour, a half century after leaving Minnesota and landing in Greenwich Village, having changed his surname from Zimmerman to Dylan along the way. As you read these words, people are filing into a Bob Dylan concert somewhere—in Anaheim or Zurich, in Boston or Berlin or, now, Beijing.

Hibbing is the first evidence offered when people assert confidently;

“Bob Dylan is a genius.” The cap, the guitar, the harmonica rack: All would become signature items after the college dropout from the Midwest hit the big Apple, leaving not only his hometown but his old self, Bobby Zimmerman, behind.

He has traveled a long, long road from Hibbing, without looking back and with, as he and the documentarians have also said, no direction home.

The Birth of a Folksinger

In New York City Dylan and his new friends are taking the Village (and the city) by storm: At right he is just another folkie spinning his discs. At home Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze, in their shared Greenwich apartment where there is pretty good plonk, and quiet time to think about the futureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the future of the world, future songs waiting to be written, their own futures. Both these photographs were made in January 1962. Dylanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first album is now just weeks away.

Bob Dylan Forever Young

The Birth of a Folksinger

From an October 20, 1963 , Duluth News Tribune article by staff writer Walter Eldot: “There’s an unwrittten code in show business that people like to be deceived. Performers, therefore, must be legendized and molded into a public image that is often quite different from what they used to be. “It happened to Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing—who is now widely known as Bob Dylan, 22, folksinger and songwriter. “His rise in barely three years has been almost as impressive as the considerable fortune he has already amassed, the character he has assumed, the reams of reviews and stories written about him, and his Carnegie Hall debut next Saturday. “Who and what is Bob Dylan?” Well asked, Mr. Eldot; a question we are still asking a half century later. Eldot and particularly the locals in Hibbing would have remembered the Golden Chords kid who was better than most, who had played dates with the touring pop star Bobby Vee, adding handclaps and a touch of piano. By the time of the Carnegie Hall breakthrough, these locals were repairing to Bob’s senior year high school yearbook, where he had written that his ambition was “To join ‘Little Richard.’” Maybe there had been clues in Hibbing regarding talents and tendencies, the ability to sing and the ability to

Bob Dylan Forever Young

learn and absorb. But, still, how had Bobby Zimmerman pulled this off in New York, if not by dint of genius? The folks back home didn’t have a clue. “But Dylan is essentially a self-made creation,” Eldot wrote, “right down to the name which he borrowed from Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet whose writings he likes, and some of the things he does strictly for effect. “My son is a corporation and his public image is strictly an act,’ says his father.” Part of the legend is that their son ran away six times before his famous flight for New York City, his seventh and final departure. But that’s part of the legend: He was a restless kid, but not a bad one, and when he headed east after barely a year at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, it was with his parents’ foreknowledge. “He had as many friends as he wanted [at college] but he considered most of them phonies–spoiled kids with whom he didn’t feel he had much in common,” his father told the News Tribune. “He wanted to have free reign. He wanted to be a folksinger, an entertainer. We couldn’t see it, but we felt he was entitled to the chance. It’s his life, after all, and we didn’t want to stand in the way. So we made an agreement that he could have one year to do as he pleased, and if at the end of that year we were not satisfied with his progress he’d go back to school.” It was precisely the kind of mutually respectful bargain a million and more young people have made with their parents through the ages, and if it doesn’t fit so conveniently with the boho/rebel/beatnik story of the soon-to-be-invented Bob Dylan, so be it. At least Mr. Zimmerman admitted that his son probably did hitchhike his way east, rather than take a bus of train: “He got himself a ride to New York.”

In New York, Dylan is performing at small venues with his guitar and harmonica while scribbling out his own songs. In September 1961, Robert Shelton of The New York Times catches his act at Gerdes Folk City in Greenwhich Village and writes a gushing review. In the meantime, folks at the Folklore Center, having seen him perform at the Bitter End and elsewhere, arrange for a proper uptown concert in Carnegie Chapter Hall. He is well on his way, and his first album has not even been released!

The Birth of a Folksinger

“The thing about rock’n’roll is that...it wasn’t enough... The songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair...sadness...triumph... faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” –Bob Dylan

What had built Bob’s surety that he had to go, and that he might find success where he was heading? Well, at university, where it had been thought he would concentrate on the liberal arts and science, young Zimmerman had instead found himself spending his time in a pizza joint, where he sang and played guitar and harmonica for his fellow students. In this period, he was drifting from Danny and the Juniors to the blues and the Weavers, as he later explained: “The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough… The songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” He added gigs at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a bona fide coffee house, to the pizza-place stints, and began introducing himself occasionally by his latterly famous stage name. In the summer of 1959 he met, in Denver, the noted African American bluesman Jesse Fuller, who was something of a one-man band—singing while accompanying himself on guitar, kazoo, and a harmonica held in a rack. Zimmerman borrowed this last bit, as he would borrow much through the years. He later paid tribute by covering a Jesse Fuller song on his debut album. In January 1961, Bobby Zimmerman, who was at the time remembered back in Hibbing as the rock’n’roll kid silenced by the principle—if he was rememberd at all—arrived in New York City as Bob Dylan, an anonymous folkie deter-

Bob Dylan Forever Young

of war. But they were free and easy, they were on their own, and for those of them like Dylan, who communicated from the stage, applause was a nightly guarantee. That’s pretty heady; that’s pretty good. There were few or none who emerged from that scene who ever looked back with regret. It was quite a moment. mined never to be quieted again. He was also determined to visit his musical idol, Woody Guthrie, the writer of “This Land Is Your Land” and scores of other popular songs. He was a man Dylan felt was “the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.” He did see Guthrie at his bedside in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, where the storied folksinger and author ( memoir: Bound For Glory) was gravely ill with Huntington’s disease. Dylan played songs for Woody, and Woody was gracious in his thanks. These audiences that Dylan was granted would become part of the lore once the young man from Minnesota began to be noticed, which happened very fast. Within a month of hitting the city, Dylan was singing in clubs in and near Greenwich Village. There was astonishingly little toil and trouble to his rise; in Dylan’s case, the term meteoric really does apply.

Dylan was drinking it all in, soaking it all up. His friend from the early days, the folksinger Dave Van Ronk, recalled in No Direction Home (the Martin Scorsese documentary about Dylan) and on many other occasions that there was no greater sponge than Dylan. He adopted the stylings of others, the inflections of blues singers who had gone before. In short order he would be borrowing bits of melody: from the slave song “No More Auction Block” for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” from the traditional ballad “Lord Randall” for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” He stole a friend’s records because, as he himself admitted to Scorsese much later, he simply had to have them. Having them was essential. In the melting pot that was Bob Dylan, all of this, mixed wtith his own individual brilliance, produced something truly special, if only something likable.

To read Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, and other books dealing with the times as they were changing, life was exciting on a daily basis among the young and the footloose in the early 1960 s. Sure, they were upset about civil rights issues, inequalities and, soon enough, the masters

Bob serenades Suze in a series of photos shot during the making of his first studio album.

The Birth of a Folksinger

Now the album has come out, the fame game is in full force, and soft moments lounging in the apartment are fewer, while formal photo session are more frequent. These photos of Bob and Suze are from the session that produced the famous cover of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan Forever Young

Once the folkies and folk fans had returned to the Village from their summer festival outposts in September of 1961, the buzz was strong. That month, two things happened that set the young performer on his course. Dylan performed at Gerdes Folk City and Robert Shelton, with whom Dylan would much later cooperate on a biography, wrote a positive review in The New York Times. Dylan and his friends, reading Shelton’s appraisal, must have felt precisely as Jack Kerouac and his pals had four years earlier, when Gilbert Millstein had declared On the Road to be a book to which attention must be paid. Meantime, that same September, Dylan was hired to play harmonica on folksinger Carolyn Hester’s new album, which she was recording with producer John Hammond for release on Columbia Records. Hammond, already a legendary

kingmaker in the recording industry offered Dylan a deal immediately, and the artist’s eponymous first album was released early the following year. A collection of mostly covers of traditional songs for the record initially sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Folks at Columbia thought that their Svengali of a producer had, in a rare act, stubbed his tow. They called the kid from Minnesota “Hammond’s Folly.” Dylan was unfazed. He was writing songs a mile a minute now. The original material fell into two categories: message, or protest, songs and then that old standby, the love song. A young woman named Suze Rotolo was influence on both kinds. She was the daughter of card-carrying American Communists and was, while in high school, working as an activist for both the Congress of Racial Equality and the anti-nuke group SANE. She had met Dylan at a concert at Riverside Church in the summer of 1961, and Dylan would later write in his memoirs: “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.”

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song | ‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along. | Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn, | It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born. — Song to Woodyt The Birth of a Folksinger

Though he claimed he did not write his songs for social or political reasons, Dylan did care; it simply cannot have been otherwise. Just after the Fourth of July in 1963, he and fellow star folksingers Pete Seeger and Theodare Bikel make their way, even at personal danger, to Greenwood, Mississippi for a voter registration rally. Dylan sings in an open field and on the back porch of the building for the local Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He performs “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the murder of the Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers—one of the new songs he is assembling for that next, different album.

Bob Dylan Forever Young

The summer of 1963 is crucial to Dylan’s gaining a foothold in the national consciousness. He wows them at the Newport Folk Festival and becomes an accepted member of folk music’s current top stars (above) which includes the group Peter, Paul, and Mary and singer Joan Baez. (Left) Dylan hangs out with singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who would remain a constant buddy, joining Dylan more than 10 years later on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.

The Birth of a Folksinger

In the spring of 1962, an album was released by a young folksinger who hailed from Minnesota. The album was called, simply, Bob Dylan. Only a few critics were appreciative of the music, which included for the most part cover versions of other people’s folk songs, but the recording didn’t cause any kind of stir, selling fewer than 5,000 copies and failing to make the U.S. charts. But the audiences in New York City’s Greenwich Village clubs who had listened to him sing night after night were sure this would change soon enough. Dylan was different, magnetic, brilliant. His original songs were captivating. None of Dylan’s subsequent records has failed to reach people, and his recent offerings of music regularly reach Number One on the charts. This is a very personal book about a very curious man: a man who has been entertaining, exasperating and fascinating us for more than half a century.

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Bob Dylan Forever Young